Suppression of thermally activated escape by heating

TL;DR

This paper presents a path integral approach to analyze how increasing temperature temporarily can significantly suppress thermally activated escape over potential barriers in reaction dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to solve escape problems with time-dependent conditions and demonstrates how temperature modulation can reduce escape rates.

Findings

Temporally increasing temperature can suppress escape rates.

Path integral methods effectively analyze time-dependent escape problems.

Temperature modulation offers control over reaction dynamics.

Abstract

The problem of thermally activated escape over a potential barrier is solved by means of path integrals for one-dimensional reaction dynamics with very general time dependences. For a suitably chosen but still quite simple static potential landscape, the net escape rate may be substantially reduced by temporally increasing the temperature above its unperturbed constant level.